Uganda garbage landslide death toll rises to 30

 

People look on as an excavator helps search for people trapped under debris after a landfill collapsed in Kampala on August 10, 2024. [AFP]

Six more bodies, including those of two children, were recovered on Wednesday from the site of a massive garbage landslide in the Ugandan capital Kampala, bringing the death toll so far to 30, police said.

Several dozen people are also still missing, police said, after the collapse at the landfill in the northern district of Kiteezi on Saturday that buried people, homes and livestock in mountains of fetid waste.

"Today, the team retrieved six dead bodies by 1730 hours (1430 GMT). This makes a total of 30 bodies so far recovered," the Uganda Police Force said on X, formerly Twitter.

They included a three-year-old boy and a girl aged six, according to a list posted by police of the latest victims found.

Earlier, Kampala metropolitan police spokesman Patrick Onyango gave a death toll of 26 and said 39 people were still missing including 35 local residents and four garbage collectors.

Excavators have been churning through the huge rubbish mounds as the desperate search for survivors continues in Kiteezi, often during torrential downpours.

The Uganda police said 120 people were sheltering in a nearby school, while 33 homes were suspected to have been engulfed in the landslide that followed heavy rains in the area.

'Hazardous heap'

The incident has been described as a "national disaster" by Kampala city mayor Erias Lukwago, who had warned at the weekend that "many, many more could be still buried in the heap".

He had previously raised concerns over risks of overflowing waste from the site, which was established in 1996 and takes in almost all garbage collected across Kampala.

President Yoweri Museveni said on Sunday he had directed the army's special forces to help in the search and rescue operation and demanded to know who allowed people to live near such a "potentially hazardous and dangerous heap".

Museveni said in a statement posted on X that he had ordered payments to the victims' families of five million Ugandan shillings ($1,300) for each fatality and one million shillings ($270) for each injured person.

But residents of the site have expressed anger towards the authorities, saying they knew about the dangers it posed and had done little to help.

Local community leader Abubaker Semuwemba Lwanyaga told AFP on Monday that officials "should own up and accept the mistake".

"The government should have relocated people from here if they wanted to put a landfill and compensated them, and not waited for a disaster to happen," he said.

Several areas in Uganda and other parts of East Africa have been battered by heavy rains recently, including Ethiopia, the second most populous country on the continent.

Devastating landslides in a remote mountainous area in southern Ethiopia last month killed around 250 people.

In February 2010, mudslides in the Mount Elgon region of eastern Uganda killed more than 350 people.